The Unwanted Bloghttp://up-ship.com/blog
Rockets, cats, aircraft, guns, politics, photography, science fiction. You know, the usual stuff.Tue, 26 Sep 2017 21:15:23 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2An engineer among the liberal artistshttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35847
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35847#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 21:15:23 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35847[...]]]>This… this struck many a nerve. Back in my aerospace engineering days, I had a *lot* of meetings that went more or less like this.

The end result, both in the video and in reality, is for the engineer to just give up and say “yeah, sure, I can do the crazy incomprehensible thing you think you want.” Work from that point forward then becomes an effort not to produce the impossible thing, but to plan out in advance how you’re going to blame who for what.

There were times when I was told to design a component that would only be physically possible in a reality with four physical dimensions. There were *many* times when I had to actually invent something (not just design, but invent, as in come up with a new propellant combination and propellant geometry that had apparently never been tried before, with all the tests and undoubtedly failures and revisions that would require) and I had to tell management in advance how much it would cost and how many man hours it would take, to within a few percent accuracy. There were times when I was told to replace an electrical conductor with a non-conductor, but to make sure that it maintained its conductance. Told to make a rocket motor that performed as well as a standard one, weighed the same, cost the same, but didn’t have a hot exhaust plume. And so on. And every time I made an objection I was told I was being “negative” or was told “that’s your job” or “make it work.”

This also works as an allegory for “a rational man among the social justice warriors.”

]]>http://up-ship.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=358511Dyna Soar/Centaurhttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35843
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35843#respondTue, 26 Sep 2017 04:11:11 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35843[...]]]>Another rare piece of early Dyna Soar color art. This one shows the Dyna Soar heading to space atop the centaur upper stage of an Atlas booster. And if you think you are seeing corrugations on the back of the spaceplane, you are correct. At this stage in the design process the Dyna Soar *did* have some fairly massive, un-aerodynamic corrugations, and for the same reason why the SR-71 has corrugations on the wing: to allow for thermal expansion. Why exactly the Boeing Dyna Soar corrugations run crossways to the airflow, I’m a little unclear on. Terrible aerodynamics, but I imagine that’s just the way the structure wanted to flex.

The corrugations rarely appear on the usually simple diagrams you see of early Dyna Soar configurations, but they were there on full-scale mockups.

]]>http://up-ship.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=358430Politicized sportsballhttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35849
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35849#commentsMon, 25 Sep 2017 22:38:27 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35849[...]]]>So the media is currently ulcerating over Trump suggesting that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who decide to disrespect the US flag & anthem before games. Here’s the thing:

1: It’s the players right to disrespect the flag, the anthem, the US.

2: It’s any citizens right to say that he’d like to see these people fired.

3: It’s the team owners right to keep them or fire them

4: And it’s the fans right to stop spending time and money on games with players who are over-paid rude jackholes.

The NFL gets neither my time nor my money, so the NFL doesn’t care what my opinion is. But when you have an audible fraction of the people in attendance in the stadium *booing* the players behavior, the NFL should probably take some notice. And if you’re one of those fans who watches and/or attends and you’re booing? Stop watching, stop attending. Pretty simple free market stuff.

A few decades ago, professional athletes didn’t get paid diddly squat. Now they get paid more than most CEO’s, certainly more that the vast majority of the STEM majors, cops and soldiers who actually make life not only better but *possible.* They now seem to be an entitled class of dimwitted self-important boobs, paid stupid sums of money to do something fundamentally unimportant. And given how dependent upon politics the NFL is for a large fraction of their vast profits (sweetheart tax deals, getting the military to expend time and treasure for flyovers and the like), you’d think that something the NFL would want their players to be is *non* political, at least on the field.

So if you are a fan who is offended that a lot of the players are disrespecting your country because they are upset that even though black criminals are shot by the police at a lower rate than white criminals, they want that ratio to be tilted even further (that might not be what they *say* their reasons are, but that’s what it comes down to), then there is a simple solution: turn the game off. Stay home. Imagine how much more time and money you’ll have if you’re now going to a stadium to spend several hours watching tattooed millionaires play eleven *minutes* of sportsball and get paid more in that time than you will all year.

If stadiums emptied and the TVs were turned to something else (heck, if you are a “football family,” maybe y’all could play Monopoly or something instead), perhaps the rather obscene amount of money being squandered on this ridiculous pastime could finally be put to some better use. What better uses? Hmmm. Let me think…

]]>http://up-ship.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=358491Encabulatorshttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35845
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35845#commentsMon, 25 Sep 2017 21:15:04 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35845[...]]]>Yes, I’ve posted these before. But I feel it’s important for everyone to maintain a proper level of understanding of the encabulator, the turbo-encabulator and the retro-encabulator.

And of course once you have an encabulator, you’ll need to diagnose it from time to time:

There have of course been advances in the field of encabulators, such as the micro-encabulator:

And the retroprototurboencabulator:

OK, the Encabulator is never going to not be funny. But the thing I noticed: in all the variants of it produced over the years, there hasn’t been a whole lot of actual variation. Where are the *all* *new*scripts?

]]>http://up-ship.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=358452APR returns to Facebookhttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35841
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35841#commentsMon, 25 Sep 2017 08:16:37 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35841[...]]]>Argh. Facebook is not my favorite thing. But, apparently, it’s where all the cool kids hang out, so the Aerospace Projects Review Facebook page that I cobbled together years ago, I’ve started posting things in again.

One of the weird things about Facebook is that you (apparently) can’t see a page unless you are signed in to Facebook, and if you are signed in, your own Facebook page when displayed to you has a bunch of editing features plastered all over it. Mine does, at any rate. So I can’t see what my own APR Facebook page looks like to other folks. Meh. So I don’t know if it looks ok or not. Anyone wants to wander by and let me know, that’d be great.

It was certainly pretty, but all those visuals were spoiled by a whole lot of “WTF am I looking at?” Especially with the “Klingons” who bore almost no relationship to any prior iteration of the Klingons, in biology, aesthetics or culture. Heck, they even have Klingons hating on other Klingons based on skin color, something that has *never* been indicated before. And of course they have cloaking devices, ten years before the Romulans invented the friggen’ things.

And Star Fleet bridge officers who attack other officers and try to mutiny. Yeah, sure, happens all the damn time in Starfleet. The rest of the story just didn’t really inspire much interest.

The first episode ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. Of course if you want to watch the second episode and those beyond, you’re supposed to pay up for the CBS All Access streaming service. But the episode left me cold, no more interested in shelling out to stream the episodes than before I saw it. So…

At least there’s still “The Orville,” a show that actually seems to get Star Trek.

]]>http://up-ship.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=358378Going up a mountainhttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35835
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35835#commentsMon, 25 Sep 2017 00:59:32 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35835[...]]]>… in a drone:

This is pretty much exactly the sort of footage that would have been impossible to get prior to the current generation of drones. So just imagine what people will be able to film once the batteries for drones are actually *good,* with the power and energy density of chemical fuels like gasoline.

I kept halfway expecting the drone to duck into a crevice in the rock face and wind up in a great interior space, lit only by the flames of a Balrog…

]]>http://up-ship.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=358353I’d watch this moviehttp://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35832
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35832#commentsMon, 25 Sep 2017 00:39:16 +0000http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=35832[...]]]>OK, let’s say your town is plagued by a transdimensional monster that takes the form of a killer psychotic clown. Who would be the best person to try to destroy this menace? That’s right, the goddamn Batman: